Admittedly, this L.A. Times article ventures a little bit into the type of gossip and dirt that we try to avoid here on Filmwell as much as possible. At the same, however, it delves into some of the intriguing methods and challenges faced by the crew of Fantastic Mr. Fox, as well as Wes Anderson’s frame of mind when making the film. So I hope you’ll forgive us.

Reached by phone in Paris this summer, a day after production had wrapped, Anderson, 40, sounded taken aback when informed of his underlings’ grumbling. To hear it from the Houston native, a self-described “novice” in stop-motion, he ignored the majority viewpoint in pursuit of something specific: a cool-looking, detail-saturated, retro-leaning stop-motion movie. Even if that meant bucking conventional animation wisdom by avoiding the modern technology that pervades the genre these days.

“It’s not the most pleasant thing to force somebody to do it the way they don’t want to do it,” Anderson said. “In Tristan [Oliver, director of photography]’s case, what I was telling him was, ‘You can’t use the techniques that you’ve learned to use. I’m going to make your life more difficult by demanding a certain approach.’

“The simple reality is,” Anderson continued, “the movie would not be the way I wanted it if I just did it the way people were accustomed to doing it. I realized this is an opportunity to do something nobody’s ever seen before. I want to see it. I don’t want afterward to say, ‘I could have gone further with this.’ ”

[…]

In keeping with the stylized nostalgia that looms large in almost all his films, Anderson knew he was after a particular lo-fi aesthetic. And despite giant leaps forward in computer-generated imagery in recent years, he put CGI and green screen off-limits for “Mr. Fox’s” animators. Materials such as plastic kitchen wrap would stand-in for water, cotton balls would be puffs of smoke and green terry cloth, grass. Even though it was much more difficult for fabricators and animators, everything had to be shot “in camera” rather than be added digitally later. As well, the writer-director stipulated that the animal puppets have real fur — long verboten in stop-motion circles for the material’s discontinuous, blown-by-the-wind look on film.

“With older stop-motion movies, you always see the technique. There’s some charm in that,” the director explained. “That’s why I like puppets with fur. The techniques are rudimentary, and they’re appealing to me.”

Fantastic Mr. Fox comes out November 25 in the U.S.